Father Louie doing fine in prison

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Doing hard time isn’t so hard for the Rev. Louie Vitale, the feisty peace-activist priest reports from federal lockup in Southern California.

But then, that’s to be expected. The 77-year-old Father Louie, as he’s known in the Bay Area, where he has been a foremost peacenik for many years, always has an upbeat attitude in prison — and the word “always” takes in quite a bit. He’s done this dance in the federal crossbars hotel three times before, all for the same offense of trespassing onto a military site in the cause of peace demonstrations.

Brant Ward/The Chronicle

The Rev. Louie Vitale, right, ministers to a homeless person at St. Boniface Catholic Church in 2005.

This time, Vitale wound up in Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex, a medium-security prison about an hour north of Santa Barbara. He was transferred there two weeks ago after bouncing around several lockups from here to Georgia over the past three months.

“They brought me up here from the federal prison in Victorville, and it was a beautiful bus ride around the desert and coastline,” Vitale said cheerfully in a collect phone call — the only kind you can make from prison — from Lompoc on Monday. “It was a really nice ride.”

A spartan prison bed and concertina wire on the fences enclosing his world don’t really bother him, he said. He went to prison in the name of peace, he said, and now he gets to spread the word of peace in a different setting. Plus he can offer some impromptu counseling in his priestly way, even though the closest he gets to official priest duties right now is working as a cleanup orderly in the prison chapel.

“I’m getting to know a lot of guys here, and they’re very receptive,” he said. “A lot of guys want to talk.”

So he does what he did at St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco, where Vitale was pastor until retiring in 2005. There, he said, “I talked to all kinds of people, people from the streets, and heard their stories. Listening to people is very important, and the stories can be very sad.”

Vitale was sentenced in January to six months in federal prison in Georgia for walking onto Fort Benning to protest the institute it houses called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The place used to be called the School of the Americas, and the training it gives to Latin American military personnel has drawn demonstrations from peace activists for decades.

Institute spokesman Lee Rials says the place is getting a bum rap, and that protesters may not know it actually trains military personnel, police and civilian personnel from all over the United States, Canada, Latin America and other places, and is a bit different from the School of the Americas. “We do a lot for cooperation in the region, and I find it amazing that people make unfounded accusations about us,” he said.

But Vitale and his fellows in the peace movement remain unconvinced, saying atrocities have been committed by Latin American soldiers trained over the years at the school. And so the priest — who was a navigator in the Air Force before being ordained in 1963 — said he has no intention of letting up in his opposition to its mission. In the meantime, he’s writing letters from prison for the peace Web site Pace e Bene.

“I get out of prison on July 24, and will go right up to San Francisco,” Vitale said — and then what? He’ll get right back to his priestly tasks, he said. Which will, of course, include peace protests of all kinds.